Let's take a step back
Posted By: TechSupport on 2009-05-07
In Reply to:
Okay. I think we can agree that in this industry, like every other, there are some bad apples. There are some bad MTSOs, some bad MTs and even some bad clients. And there are some good apples, too.
Unfortunately, even the best MTSOs have to deal with a lot of new realities in this business that limit their options. Over the past 15 to 20 years, the business has become much more competitive, clients are now being run by bean-counters who squeeze every penny out of contracts that they can, and the investment that an MTSO has to make in technology today has simply skyrocketed - not only the initial investment, but the ongoing investment in tech people, etc. to keep it running. On top of that, there's been the deteriorating business climate that has actually been going on since 2007, although it didn't attract significant notice until late in 2008.
And now comes speech rec. There's a lot of MTSOs who haven't been thrilled about this because it's a huge investment and because they know how crummy SR really is - but clients become sold on the exaggerations in savings that the SR missionaries preach, and start insisting on it. So you'll do SR or they'll find someone else.
The costs to every business in America for what we call compliance (to all of the jillions of laws that affect business) have also skyrocketed. You can find plenty of information about this yourself. These costs include all sorts of insurance and a lot of costs in terms of your operation just to keep yourself out of court or an administrative hearing of some kind.
MTSO's don't run the industry like some people here seem to think. Clients run the industry. Technology runs the industry. Congress and various administrative agencies at every level of government run the industry. Lawyers run the industry.
There is one thing that I do criticize many MTSOs for, however, and that is the crappy line rate that many of them are paying for SR editing. The typical scenario is that they promise you'll be able to edit jillions more lines per hour than you can transcribe, so you shouldn't mind going from 9 or 10 cpl to 3 or 4 cpl. Unfortunately, you buy into this and then discover that if you do your editing job properly, you really can't do all that many more lines per hour. So your next paycheck sucks. You give it a little longer...and your paycheck still sucks. A couple more paychecks that suck, and now YOU are the one who is out of options.
It's no good telling people who get caught in this trap Well, then, get into another field! because by this time they have no money to be trained in anything else. Their kids are already fighting with the dog to see who gets the food in his bowl. So my criticism is the shameful way that many MTSOs have dealt with their people.
What bothers me the most about this is that every line of an SR document gets edited - even if it doesn't need to be changed. In other words, there's really no difference in the KNOWLEDGE that an Editor has to bring to a line whether she declares the line to be correct or decides that it needs correction. That line is correct is PRECISELY THE SAME SORT OF JUDGMENT as saying That line is wrong.
This is a knowledge business, not a typing business. There is absolutely no excuse for reducing the line rates so drastically (and little experience to show that people can still earn the same living). This means, then, that the MTSO is buying knowledge on the cheap - and that's one thing that I can't forgive them for. That, and the way they sucker people into accepting editing jobs in the first place.
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We should go one step further than that!
We should stop buying products made in other countries if at all possible (Wal*Mart comes to mind). Don't forget: Every time you buy a foreign product, an American somewhere at some point lost her/his job to offshoring because of that product. MTs represent ONE segment in a loooooooong line of people who are losing/have lost their jobs to offshoring.
One step further
You got one step further than myself. I sent my resume but didn't even hear back from them...so I am guessing they were probably inundated with resumes. Doggone it anyway!
Maybe Transcend needs to step up
to the plate and fix these issues before their investimate goes down the drain.
Yes but Transcend needs to step up
They are loosing a lot of their money by allowing MDI to continue to operate they way they do. I personally would love to see them merge MDI into Transcend and be one company. I'm holding out hope this happens, if it does not then I'm leaving MDI.
Been there . . . this is actually a step up on dictators for me!!! NM
NM
You don't have to go to Career Step
I smell something a little fishy here. Are you advertising for Career Step? I repeat if you are already a transcriptionist, then you can apply for online jobs. It does not take a certificate from Career Step. I have been offered many jobs online, and I do not have a certificate from Career Step or any other training program. 
Career Step
Just to clarify about Career Step, the cost is nowhere near $5000. It is in fact, between $1500 and $2000 the last I knew. I do not work for them, but graduated a year ago and they did prepare me for acute care MT work. (After 9 months I am making about $20,000 a year, working 2 IC jobs for a total of about 40 hours a week).
Career Step
CS has been a dream for me. With their training, I had 7 offers for at-home MT employment within 2 weeks of graduation. It is a hard course, and the final exam has a 50% fail rate, but it really prepares you for the real world of MT. If it wasn't that hard I think I would be dead in the water. If you want to learn more, they have a forum for people who have questions about joining at http://careerstep.groupee.net/eve/forums/a/frm/f/6960008433
and their website is www.careerstep.com. Before joinging, I checked them out with the BBB and called them probably 20 times with questions. They were very helpful and have a shiny record with the BBB. Also, they are one of the few schools approved by the AAMT, as you can see from the AAMT website. They are also a lot cheaper than most places. Hope that helps!
Career Step
Career Step is legit (and I don't get any $$ for recommending them). The course is self-paced and allowed me to work from home right after graduation. The website has all the cost info. on it.
Career Step
If I knew then what I know now, I would not have attended Career Step. I would have attended MTEC or Andrews.
Does feel like the new Q. This is step 1...
Beware.
Career Step
My sister took this course 3 years ago and was hired as a graduate. I was able to view this course and was very impressed with it and how it prepared the students. There is a lot of practice dictation starting from beginner to advanced, working your way up. Another good school is M-TEC. When I helped my sister research what companies were looking for in graduates, these were the 2 schools that always popped up as being recognized by companies that hire graduates.
I went to a local business school and worked on site at a hospital/clinic for 5 years before working from home.
I agree, but it's a step up from
and I don't care to the Nth power.
Hold on there! Now I must step in.
Don't be putting down people who like to do VR. I did straight typing for over 15 years and I am making the same, if not more, doing VR now. I was not a very slow typist, and quality is my first priority. I've been doing VR for almost a year now and love it. What makes it easy for me is I never really relied on Expanders to up my line rate since my hospital didn't really allow them, except for autocorrect. I didn't have an Expander until 6 years ago. Doing VR, I can't use the expander I did finally learn, but it's no big deal.
Like some other posters stated, it depends on who else is doing the reports whether or not VR is easy or hard. Some days, my reports are easy, other days tough. It's the same when doing straight typing. Some dictators are easy, other are tough.
I don't think VR is really made for large companies with hundreds of transcriptionists. It's made for the smaller companies that all conform to the same verbiage.
If you're good/fast/quality-oriented with straight typing without expanders, then VR would be good for you. If you rely on an expander to get those lines, you will have a problem in the beginning, but if you're flexible, it will pan out.
Don't down people because they like VR. You know what they say......try it. You may like it.
its true, but wish WMX would take the first step
been here for awhile and I am not an underperformer by any means. Yet i still get the NSA message dozens of times a day for the past month. So while I think that waiting it out is the right move for me and that those who can't will go someplace else and create more work, I do wish mgmt would evaluate who is not performing up to par and cut them loose. Sorry if that sound harsh, but i consistently do over 200 lph straight and close to 300 ASR and I think those that perform better should have some kind of preference over those that are at 125 to 150 lph, which i believe is below what mgmt expects each day. don't mean to be offensive to anyone personally, but this is what the industry has come down to.
okay, your first step would be to find out...
What the sale or merger involved, if the sale involved assets only or if it included ALL contracts. If the sale was assets only (meaning accounts) you SHOULD be free of the contract. This would mean they could not have included employees as an asset. If the terms of the sale included existing employee contracts or included the employees as assets, you would be bound by the noncompete clause. Sounds confusing but makes sense. In other words, you need to know if they sold you guys along with the company. That is what happened to me in the past (this was way long ago, 1970s). The new company paid $1000 per employee. We got no notice. one day they told us at 2 p.m. today you no longer work for _____ but are an employee of _____. I walked right then and there. I was not then nor will I ever be for sale! Fortunately for me, at that time we had no noncompete clause in place so we just went and recruited the old clients and started our own service.
Anyone hear of Future Step?
I received an email from Future Step telling me about a job. Never heard of them. Never applied with them?????
QA is not a step up. They make less than the MTs and are on quota.
x
but of course, people in the 10-step program
.
They do get a fee for all who actually enroll in career step.
Watch that first step off the horse. NM
nm
let the MTSOs step in the MTs shoes - sm
If they cant pay a decent wage, them maybe it is time to let some of the clients go and work for yourself. It is just like MTs, if you accept a low rate of pay that is what you get. Stand up for yourself MTSOs and ask for more money. Get a back bone.
To follow that logic one step further,
then why is Transcend trying so hard on this board to convince everyone they are not the anti-Christ? If they were that good, everyone would be beating a path to their door and they wouldn't have to be defending themselves to the degree we are seeing...
but correct me if I'm wrong...
Career Step is $1320 or $1560
x
If they use MTTEST by Career Step - Don't bother...
...just like Career Step's program, MTtest is GREATLY flawed. And the potential employers don't bother to review this or your testing. If an employer lazily uses MTTest (and is recruiting people to buy Career Step's scam terrible training program), I don't bother. Even if you get it right, the module is flawed and will likely say you got it wrong. Don't waste your time being insulted by same.
Companies that actually send you dictation to transcribe are the best to test with. They test your true knowledge/ability, not through a flawed and inadequate multiple choice module that's sole purpose is to recruit people to Career Step.
Just my 2 cents... :O)
Each journey begins with one small step.
If one hospital/MTSO sees the folly of VR, the lawsuits, etc., they will stop this NONSENSE. Thank you for your validation of my efforts.
Ouch. This hurts but it's so true. It might be time to step
I think it might be time to give up some benefits in exchange for someone who knows what I look like and treats me mostly like I'm a human being. I'm so discouraged.
Yes...Career Step has a referral program where you receive something like sm
50.00 for every person who signs up for Career Step through you. I BET they are affiliated. How unprofessional can one co. be?
For seasoned, fast transcriptionists, hourly would be a step down ...
I agree with your post. I've given a lot of thought lately to whether hourly would be more fair (given the extras that we have to do), and I've come to the conclusion that it is not. In the spirit of honesty, if I were to take an hourly position, my production would suffer for it.
As an experienced and fast transcriptionist, the amount of time I spend looking up unfamiliar terms is negligible, and I've reached a point of knowing what mush-mouthed blanks I won't get, after listening six or seven times.
The only thing I ask for is pay commensurate to my experience and knowledge. With a decent line rate, I could accept that there are other things that go into my job and that my line rate doesn't just pay for my production - it pays for the emails, and the instant messages, and figuring out line counts, and spending ten minutes every so often looking for a doctor's address.
As it is, at 8 cpl, those things are not worth the amount of money that I'm making. They seem superfluous and cut into my real life.
So, in answer to the first question, with 12 years of experience, an ingrained attention to detail, and all the knowledge of this profession that 12 years can bring, I believe my worth is 13-14 cpl. That's roughly $47,000 a year at 1500 lines a day. I think, given the intensity of our work hours (and the fact that, unlike other jobs, we don't get to spend an hour talking to coworkers or daydreaming or resting for any reason), that's a very, very fair wage in this day and age.
I think the voice file is the next step. As far as the copy typing, sm
I didn't do as well as I thought I would either. That not being able to back up more than a word kinda sucks. Still, it was fun. I guess I need to get out more - ha.
Hoorah! I'm still a step ahead of a gas station clerk. n/m
f
Spheris - is it true they will hire Career Step grads without
making them take employment test? It is so stated on New MT board.
Anyone heard of Career Step program?..cost?..legit?
I checked out the Spheris website and I don't have enough experience to apply...but they directed me to Career Step kind of as a prerequisite to get your foot in the door for employment....there's gotta be a some kind of cost, but I didn't stick around to find out....link, after link, after link..yada yada...anyone have any comments on this setup?
Spheris will hire you. They have lots of Career Step people.
As long as you do not need health insurance, they are fine for a new grad.
I worked in QA for Transcending back in 2000-2001. They were paying hourly back then. SM
The accounts weren't too horribly bad. The reason I ended up leaving was because slowly but surely they began to inch closer and closer to paying QA by production. When I first started, the quota was something like 30 reports a day. We simply had to make sure that we QA'd all reports that were close to being out of TAT first and then do the rest. Then, my supervisor left and they hired a new one who immediately called a big teleconference meeting and said we had to up production to 60 reports a day. Then, they started counting lines. Which was fine because they were still paying hourly.
Next, there was an MT who used VR software because she was blind - yes blind. Again, when I first started, I was told we had to edit her entire reports because she used the VR software and we had to make sure that everything was correct and made sense. Then, we are told only check the blanks. I wasn't comfortable with that and I continued to completely proof every word. Then I was called on the carpet not because I wasn't meeting the production quota, but because I was ONLY meeting the production quota. I told them I was proofing all of the MT's work that used VR, I was told that no one ever told me to proof every word of the VR reports and that I needed to fill in blanks and move on. When I voiced my concerns, I was told that was my job, to fill in blanks and I should move on and strive to product above the standards. Next thing you know, rumors abounded about changing the QA staff to being paid on production. So I left.
There just seemed to me to be too little concern for quality and more emphasis on quantity and I just didn't want to be part of company who would take money out of my pocket just to line their own and that's what they were doing by putting QA on production. I also am not comfortable with the job of QA being thought of as a blank filler. There is much more to the QA profession than just simply filling in blanks.
I don't know if Transcend ever did start paying QA by production, but I could see that the idea was being floated there. Maybe there was a enough protest that they didn't change from hourly.
Good luck to you!
Phoenix Medcom- Another apply a few months back, ask to take a test and never heard back??
I applied a month or two ago, received an email from someone asking if I would take a test and said she was getting ready to go on vacation for a week, so I hurried and immediately and told her I'd love to take the test. I never heard back. I waiting thinking she went on vacation and would contact me when she got back to do the test but nothing...very strange..Just wondered if this happened to anyone else.
Has everyone heard back from Keystrokes yet regarding the email we received a while back?
Just wandering why I haven't heard any response yet.
I sent them an email back in August and never heard back sm
Is this company on Long Island? I checked out their website and even tried calling once. Were you successful in contacting them? All i know is that the company is owned by some doctors.
Hopefully, you will hear back. Unfortunately, I immediately heard back from MD-IT
but somehow with over 16 years of experience, I blew the test. I was soooo disappoionted and yet pretty stunned. I am by no means perfect but I haven't flunked a test in years. I expected it in my early years but not this far down the road. I was so confident and they will not tell you which part you did not pass and why so it really just blew my mind. I must have been in shock for like two hours after I got the email. Oh well, someone will want me....hopefully. I was thinking about OSi but I don't think I could take another rejection if I never heard back.
I had the same thing happen, went back to MQ, went back to KS and could not be sm
happier. I am on a different account then the first time and it is as if it is a different company. I have a great lead who leaves us alone most of the time but is there when I need her. It showed me that you can have a different experience within the same company.
I have to say that in the few weeks since they have the new office, it is much more organized probably because there are a lot of people there all the time. I had the pleasure of speaking to the new HR manager who was HR at a hospital, got my questions answered about insurance as I am going to full time and had a live voice pick up the phone.
Not all change is bad. This is one company that has changed for the better.
I was reading about the back up help. I would like also to have some back up work.
 I am not getting anywhere near 12,000 lines this go around. My goal is 12,000 lines each pay period.
Back away from the hoops!! Back away!
I worked for them about 6 months - same mess to get hired - FBI check is right! It was unreal. I was so excited, though - they promised me the moon, and I really thought I had found my new home after centuries with that other company who shall not be named. What a disappointment, to say the least. All around horrible experience, and I would NEVER recommend them. Certainly they were not worth the hoops at all. Total waste of effort.
Back to ya!
--
Thanks for getting back with me!
x
Has anyone gone back
to Transcend after receiving letter asking you to come back? If so, how are things this time around?
I'm not looking for a pat on the back and
I know it is like that everywhere but I'm sick and tired of cleaning up after this person, getting phone calls begging me to fix this or that because they can't count on this other MT; I mean the list goes on and on. I know that in this field flexibility is everything but I'm also not bending over and taking it anymore, I'm flexed out!
They got back to where
Get off of her back!
This was a simple question. If you don't have the answer, don't post. No get in the shower!
Wanna play?
We can BACK IT UP
As a Medquist or MQ employee, and I have seen many on this board, we have legitimate complaints about what has been going on.
The REAL FACT here is that many of our offices are closing or have closed, we have been transferred to the Amherst office, we have no work, no one wants to discuss it and many other issues. There are problems and this is a FACT.
RUN and don't look back.
They are BY FAR the worst company to work for. Pay, even though it is direct deposit, was never on time. Sure, they offered to pay for you overdraft fees, but it took forever to actually get your pay. And they would never tell you in advance that it was going to be late so you could avoid the problems. Plus, they had horrible supervisors that did not know what they were doing. Always were IM you and causing you to lose time while wanting to chit-chat....They had some good accounts but lost them due to being unprofessional and other reasons that I do not know. Stay away! Horrible place!
RUN and don't look back!!!!..sm
I was an employee with them. I can sum it up. If you don't mind not knowing when you are going to receive your payday (even though it is direct deposit) then they are a great company. Honestly, they are horrible. They are the most unprofessional company I have EVER seen and been employed by. It was not just one instance of pay arriving late, but I quit at the third time in a row. And they did not warn you ahead of time....they mentioned it the DAY that you were supposed to be getting your payday, and they did not do that until so many people raised such a stink over it! Plus, the so-called supervisors are a joke. They do not know what they are doing and are the most foul-mouthed individuals I have ever seen. PLUS, they keep IM you ever few minutes to where you cannot get your work done. They had an EXCELLENT account and lost it due to so much unprofessionalism because they could not get their act together. Please, run and don't look back...otherwise, you will just be looking for your paycheck that doesn't arrive until weeks later....
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